Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Sometimes a film takes years to click. The first time I sat down with Inside Llewyn Davis, I came away genuinely disappointed. I'm a massive Coen Brothers fan, I've loved them from Fargo (1996) onwards, and yet here I was watching what felt like a whole lot of nothing. A bloke trudging through a grey, frozen New York, bumming sofas off people who barely tolerate him, failing at every turn. I didn't get it. I filed it away and moved on.

More than ten years later, I gave it another go. And now I completely get it.

Here's the thing I missed first time around: this isn't really a film about a struggling folk musician. The music is the surface. Underneath, it's a film about a man absolutely hollowed out by grief, going through the motions of a life he can no longer feel properly connected to. Once you clock that, everything shifts. The circular structure, the repeated images, the way Llewyn seems almost cursed to sabotage himself at every opportunity. It's not aimless. It's the shape of someone trapped in a loop of loss, unable to move forward, maybe not even wanting to.

Oscar Isaac is extraordinary in the lead. There's no vanity in the performance. Llewyn is frequently unlikeable, often his own worst enemy, and Isaac never asks you to forgive him for it. He just plays the man as he is: talented, broken, exhausting. But as good as Isaac is, it's John Goodman and Carey Mulligan who lodged themselves in my head after this rewatch. Goodman shows up in a sequence that feels like it's from a different, stranger film altogether, and it's all the better for it. He's enormous and menacing and darkly funny, in the way that only Goodman can be. Mulligan, meanwhile, gets some of the sharpest lines in the script and delivers every one of them like a knife between the ribs. She's furious and funny and completely right about Llewyn, which makes her scenes genuinely uncomfortable to watch.

The soundtrack deserves its own mention. Produced by T Bone Burnett, it's stunning. The folk songs are performed live and in full, and the Coens are confident enough to just let them breathe. There's no cutaway, no montage. You sit there and you listen. It's a bold choice and it pays off completely. The music becomes the one place where Llewyn feels real, which makes the rest of his existence feel all the more bleak by contrast.

I think what the Coens are doing here sits in the same tradition as Barton Fink (1991), another film of theirs about a creative man slowly consumed by his own failures and the world's indifference to his talent. Both films have that quality of a bad dream you can't quite shake. Both reward patience. And both, I'd argue, are better on a second watch than a first.

My only advice is this: if you watched Inside Llewyn Davis years ago and bounced off it the way I did, go back. Don't go in expecting a plot in the traditional sense. Go in asking what it feels like to be someone who has lost the one person that made everything make sense, and who has no idea how to build a life in the wreckage of that. The film answers that question quietly, and brilliantly.

Four and a half stars. Highly recommended, and I mean that without any qualification.

Rating: ★★★★  | Year: 2013  | Watched: 2025-04-05

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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